Signs and signatures
The First Lady of American Fiction
Darshan Singh Maini

Edith Wharton, an aristocrat, loved the ambience of orchids, champagne and chandeliers which lingered as a matter of taste and sentiment. The most daring of her books such as The Reef, The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence are works not only fuelled by a flame of illicit love in her matronly bones but also refined by the alchemy of art. The "Freudian" lady was wholly in sympathy with the values of her class and clan such as the sanctity of home life, and hated vulgarity in any shape or form.

Though Wharton wrote with an authority on a variety of subjects, and some volumes of verse, it’s her achievement in the field of fiction that sets her apart. In The House of Mirth, The Reef, The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence, the theme of money as power, and sex as power, persists amidst many a variation.

The Reef (1812), Wharton’s most ‘Jamesian’ novel in technique, style and vision, an "opus" into which she had put her "inmost heart", is so tightly structured as to become a dramatic poem. No wonder, James admired, without a shade of irony, the book’s "psychological Racinism, unity, intensity and gracility". For most Wharton readers, however, The Custom of Country (1918) with its savage indictment of the nouveau riche, and The Age of Innocence (1920), her Pulitzer Prize novel that combines nostalgia with satire, and poetry with realism, constitute the summit of her achievement.

The Age of Innocence, written during her long settlement in France as a requirement of the American imagination in exile, and an immediate success, was, in the opinion of most critics, a product of a talent that had so ripened as to become mellow in tone, but was coercive enough to generate a unique poetry of passion in memorable images and idiom. It’s perhaps this side of her restive personality that James admired the most.

In The Touchstone and in Sanctuary, Wharton adds subtle turns and twists to morally inflammable situations somewhat in the manner of James, and employs the master’s technique of making the protagonist’s consciousness a registering centre to create a condition of conscience where the power of the unspoken truth has a redemptive charm. And in Bunner Sisters she dramatises in harrowing detail the theme of misplaced idealism, chilly renunciation and gratuitous suffering.

Madam de Treymas dramatises "the international theme" and we find an American conscience in full and resonant revolt against moral blackmail. Wharton’s understanding of the mystique of an impoverished French nobility that nourished form and style at the expense of the spirit, and subordinated the imagination to cold logic, is every bit as authentic as James’s.

In the other two Wharton classics Ethan Frome and Summer, each written during the period of her sexual ‘revolution’, we have two opposed views of the problem of "moral desolation". Ethan Frome, an acknowledged tour de force, has something of a Greek tragedy and its icy ethos make it altogether a Hawthorne tale of spiritual erosion.

All these novels and novellas are, indeed, tremendous enterprises of the fictiveness, wherein fabulation feeds ravenously on personal experience, and yet remains strenuously and integrally within the confines of art. Her moral vision seems to suggest that each person has to work out a personal equation which could permit him or her to live authentically within the inherited framework of evolved codes and values, and the sum of earned, individual perceptions.

What accounts most for the tremendous appeal of Wharton even today is the beauty and power of her prose. As James himself comments: "Since Stevenson, I know no body who can festoon English words with such gallic grace." From the beginning, there is a hint of idiomatic energy, felicity, and finesse in her writings, and as her life becomes more and more troubled in body and thought, and her vision of society, more and more daring, the language assumes a unique lambency, suppleness and warmth on the one hand, a remarkable sinewy strength, on the other.

In consonance with the requirements of her changing psyche, she succeeded in evolving a style which is at once light and intense, crystalline and craggy, flowing and ‘finished’.

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize and other international prizes, she displayed something of the moral magnificence of George Eliot. She didn’t quite understand the new, energetic side of America, but she had learnt to regard the American spirit as her greatest bulwark against the forces of Philistinism. And that’s how the American revere the First Lady of "the House of Fiction".

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